How long would it take you to go crazy if you had to walk a hundred feet each time you wanted to click your mouse?
Far under an iconic fashion store in the shopping heart of New York City, a Loss Prevention Manager (LPM) sits in his office and stares at a computer screen. Over a hundred feet away, behind three foot thick walls, sits a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) with all the surveillance footage
, live and recorded, for the entire store.
Something catches the manager’s eye on the screen. There’s a certain turn to the person he’s watching, a glance and a body language that makes him squint at the screen and lean forward. Then, the person just walks off – gone. The LPM wants to see that again. He needs to see that again. He can’t see it again – not unless he gets up and walks that hundred feet to the room where the DVR is sitting; humming, recording and completely inaccessible by the mouse on his desk.
Yes, this makes no sense. It’s crazy. Sure, a lot of things in NYC are crazy, like cronuts, but not being able to control a DVR from your office desk just turns the LPM into a watcher watching the cameras watch. If you can’t actively review surveillance or double-check things when your spidey senses tingle, then you either end up alerting floor security over nothing – which can be embarrassing at best, or end up as a litigious, public relations nightmare at worst – or – you alert no one, lose valuable inventory and latently encourage further theft.
Somebody’s got to fix this, and that somebody is Advanced Lock and Security. We are great at Commercial Security Troubleshooting.
Hold it – I bet you’re saying right about now – if the LPM can see the footage, why can’t he control the program to rewind and review footage? Ah, there’s the rub – therein lay the trouble. Sure the video cable is just like the one in your house for cable tv. Miles (and miles) of it are spooled all over the country, so what’s another hundred feet? It’s the mouse wire that’s the problem: the USB cable.
The solution is to just put in a USB extension, or, in this case – a bunch of them – on the mouse cable, right? A simple solution – that won’t work. Nice try though, for the record, a USB cable’s limit, due to gauge and wattage, is around 15 meters. Don’t feel bad; the three companies that failed didn’t even get that far. They’d never seen a situation like this and had no interest in seeing one like it either.
We got the call, made the trip and solved the problem. We’re not the only ones that think we’re great at Commercial Security Troubleshooting. We get a lot of wild calls. Sure, the 3ft walls weren’t particularly fun, but old city buildings with foundational structures like that are not uncommon.
How did we bridge the 100ft gap so the manager could work the program with the mouse on his desk? When you call us, we’ll answer with the solution in our hand. That’s the only hint you’re getting.
The moral of the story: To get ahead of a problem, you’ve got to think Advanced.
